Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 Review

In the name of science, or in actual fact solely for our own amusement, we’ve paired up two unlikely suspects in the world of external hard drives. IOSafe’s latest effort, which is a mammoth beast and claims to be indestructible, and Freecom’s Hard Drive XS, which claims to be one of the world’s smallest USB 3.0 drives.

We wanted to take them out and put them in fun and kooky situations, since they are an unlikely pair and thus excellent candidates for a sitcom pilot. However, the IOSafe is just too bloody fat and heavy to carry around so we had to leave him at home and just take the Hard Drive XS to the park to go on the swings instead.

The Hard Drive XS 3.0 is a cool little number, dressed in sleek, sexy black rubber and giving you an alluring gaze that is impossible to resist if you are some kind of technosexual weirdy beardy. It is fast, bloody fast, when it’s hooked up to a USB 3.0 port. It boasts it can manage 5gbs / second transfer and it generally performed at that level or just under. It also has a whopping 1.5 Terabytes of space on it, making it small in stature but with a big heart.

It’s a quiet little number too, rarely making so much as a whirr, which in our experience has always been an annoyance with external hard drives. It only weighs 860 grams so is highly portable. The 3.5″ SATA drive is low on power, too, making it a worthy purchase if you’re always eager for mammoth amounts of space to work with. It goes for £130.00 here.

Here is a photo of the IOSafe on the left, the XS on the right and a quaint British 50 pence piece for comparison, and lens flare.